Another Van Rijn Performance

Satan's World, XXII.

After one night locked in a room of his captors' castle, van Rijn gains the concession to sleep in the comparative warmth and comfort of his disabled spaceship:

"...he had been at the top of his form, cursing, coughing, wheezing, weeping, swearing by every human and nonhuman saint in or out of the catalogue that one more bedtime without respite from the temperatures, the radiation, the dust, the pollen, the heavy metals whose omnipresence not only forced outworlders to take chelating pills lest they be poisoned but made the very air taste bad, the noises, the stinks, the everything of this planet whose existence was a potent argument for the Manichaean heresy because he could not imagine why a benevolent God would wish it on the universe: another night would surely stretch his poor old corpse out stiff and painful - Finally Thea grew alarmed and took it upon  herself to change their quarters." (pp. 561-562)

Often I summarize or paraphrase but sometimes only a full quotation serves. Despite her fairly intense acquaintance with van Rijn, Thea has no suspicion of his manipulative skills. A dangerous man to keep as a prisoner, he would wind up buying the prison. This performance, "...at the top of his form...," is clearly an act but was he merely letting himself go and expressing himself freely while waiting for the Shenna to communicate?

Poul Anderson might have had James Blish's A Case Of Conscience in mind when he wrote about a planet as evidence for Manichaeanism. (Mani was not a Christian heretic but a religious founder who claimed to synthesize the teachings of Zarathustra, the Buddha and Jesus.)